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I have a 16-bit program (originally run under Windows 3.0) which I believe the only way to run now is under Wine.

You want DOSBox. You can actually run Windows 3.1 on it. (I helped one helped someone configure it on a 64-bit Win 7 system to run a Win 3.1 app. He needed printing ability, so I installed a postscript driver that directed output to a file--DOSBox can read/write to the directory under which is installed--then used Ghostscript to convert the file to PDF and open Adobe Reader.)

There are some DosBox forks/patches out there that enable things like parallel port passthrough... that'd be a nice one to have official support for. Seems they have a fair number of interesting builds at: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/SVN...

It's getting pretty complex for this guy though. This whole exercise would be learning how to use DosBox, whihc he doesn't want to do, or learning a modern graphic layout program, which he doesn't want to do. I see so many red flags that tell me I'd end up owning every problem on his computer.

Maybe he could pick up an old 286 machine at a hamfest?

There are some DosBox forks/patches out there that enable things like parallel port passthrough... that'd be a nice one to have official support for. Seems they have a fair number of interesting builds at: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/SVN...

That's perfect! The software the Paris airport of Orly is running is called Flight Simulator 5.0.

We're totally splitting the consultancy fee on this one.

dosbox of course

Does dosbox work on FreeDOS? jk

so they could use FreeDOS to play old DOS games

That's not dumb or anything, but superfluous, considering this exists.

dosbox of course

DOSbox.

The Rebirth project works fine (under Windows, I've not tried it under Linux, much to me shame) also.

MS-DOS for Linux? Mac? It can finally happen!

To quote Londo Mollari, "I can only assume that you have not been paying attention!"

PEBKAC. DosBox is easy to configure on all platforms.

Actually, newer SVN + patches builds for DosBox go much further than that:
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/SVN_Builds

The best one, if you ask me, is the SVN Daum build (alas, their website is down at the moment). To quote its set of difference to Vanilla DosBox:

Description: The Windows build incorporates Direct3D with pixelshaders, OpenglHQ, Innovation, Glide, zip/7z mount, Beep, NE2000 Ethernet, Graphis user interface (menu), Save/Load states, Vertical sync, CPU flags optimization, Various DOS commands (PROMPT, VOL, LABEL, MOUSE, etc) and CONFIG.SYS commands (DEVICE, BUFFERS, FILES, etc), Continuous turbo key, Core-switch key, Show details (from menu bar), Nice DOSBox icon, Font patch (cp437), MAKEIMG command, INTRO, Ctrl-break patch, DBCS support patch, Automatic mount, Printer output, MT-32 emulation (MUNT), MP3CUE, Overscan border, Stereo-swap, SDL_Resize, MemSize128, Internal 3dfx voodoo chip emulation, etc.

I emphasized the important bit. What these two little words mean is the this DosBox build can not only emulate a DOS printer to dump stuff into various output formats (PNG, PDF, etc.), but it can also pass along the output to a Windows printer driver (which allows you to print to any USB printer) as well as use a real parallel port on your computer to let the DOS talk directly to the printer.

I know at least one company that is using this DosBox build to support printing out of a 20+ year old billing software.

maybe you should consider using dosbox...
http://www.dosbox.com/
http://www.sierrahelp.com/Utilities/Emulators/DOSBox/DOSBox.html

I think their top sellers list only covers the last week or so, because most or all of the games on it were on sale last weekend.

There's lists of games that use DOSBox here and here. They're a year or two out of date but probably not far off, since most of the recent additions to GOG.com are Windows games from the late 1990s or 2000s or modern indie games.

You can have both!

Install FreeDos in the c:\dos folder of your DosBox machine. You'll get most of FreeDos' new functionality, while keeping the useful features of DosBox.

see here: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/TOOLS:FreeDOS

The problem is I need to find a good DOS-based virtual machine that can run DosBox from FreeDOS on DosBox.

/yodawg

You can have both!

Install FreeDos in the c:\dos folder of your DosBox machine. You'll get most of FreeDos' new functionality, while keeping the useful features of DosBox.

see here: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/TOOLS:FreeDOS

The problem is I need to find a good DOS-based virtual machine that can run DosBox from FreeDOS on DosBox.

You can have both!

Install FreeDos in the c:\dos folder of your DosBox machine. You'll get most of FreeDos' new functionality, while keeping the useful features of DosBox.

see here: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/TOOLS:FreeDOS

What I don't get is why he'd choose Win 3.1 of all things when Win95 has been supported for the last couple of releases and its a lot easier to find newer programs that will run on Win9X than it is to find stuff that runs on Win 3.x, not to mention while Win95 wasn't the most stable OS out there it was leaps and bounds better than 3.x.

And although emulators are a hack, they're a successful one. We just have to hope that the emulator community keeps up its DRM-defeating record.

"DOSBox, an x86 emulator with DOS"

Seems like DOSBox falls under the "emulator" category...

Generally, if they have applications that will not run on 64-bit Windows, it is because the applications are 16-bit, not 32-bit.

Which would probably make Dosbox the simplest solution.

Have those games been updated to run on 10.8?

In general, the games never ran and never will run directly under any version of Mac OS X (or even "classic" Mac OS), and hence do not have to be updated. The currently released games fall into four categories:

• They are DOS/Windows games, but are supported by ScummVM. The GOG installer will install ScummVM to run them. Before you yell "those are not native Mac ports!", keep in mind that those games were originally basically a lot of sound, graphics and a script, bundled with a DOS-based script interpreter. ScummVM is a modern replacement for those script interpreters (it's also used on the Windows for most of those games).
• They are other DOS games. These are packaged so they run under DOSBox. These are obviously not native Mac ports either, but they're handled exactly the same by GOG on Windows. It's the same principle as using a Super Nintendo emulator to run old SNES games.
• They are Windows games. I'm only aware of The Witcher and King's Bounty being in this situation. The Witcher is based on Wine, I don't know about King's Bounty but I guess it's the same (but it may also be a native Mac port). In this case it's mostly a matter of not being able to play the games at all, or playing them under Wine. Your call.
• They are dual Mac/Windows releases. I'm only aware of The Witcher 2 being in this situation.

That said: ScummVM, DOSBox and Wine all work under 10.8. Since they are emulation layers to some extent, chances are actually higher that they will keep working with future Mac OS X releases (or at least can be fairly easily updated) than with so-called native ports. At least every boxed Mac game I ever bought is gathering dust (from Lemmings for System 7 to Deus Ex and No One Lives Forever for Mac OS X/PowerPC) (*) (**), while I can still play every single DOS/Windows game I ever bought thanks to DOSBox and Wine.

Since The Witcher 2 was only just released, I think it's a good bet that it will run under 10.8. Also, like the other person said, the Interplay promo does not include any of the Mac-ified games. All DOSBox-based ones are trivial to get running though, and the Windows ones generally aren't that hard either (I've been buying and playing gog.com games on my Mac for several years now).

(*) ok, one exception: Space Quest IV for Mac, which is supported by ScummVM...
(**) I know about Sheepshaver, but it wasn't been very stable when I tried it

I said no to star craft two and diablo 3 as well.

totally sucks as I really put a ton of hours in the previous versions.

I'm a bit nostalgic to play Warcraft 1, anyone know if that'll load and play on XP?

Yeah, it's called Dosbox.

Is there something about using Windows that makes people completely unable to find their own trivially-searched information? Or is it just that these are the people who use Windows without feeling completely cramped by its assumptions and limitations and so they never switch to something else?

Just for kicks, I pulled out a floppy with some files on it from 1987 ( My resume was short back then! ). I had no problems reading the files. However, I could not run any 16 bit programs ( I found a copy of Norton SI -- I was wondering what the speed index on my Core i7 would be ).

Try using DosBox. It's an emulator so it'll work on modern hardware.

With Windows XP going away, in a few years you might be looking for an old box to run your favorite program. In another few years you might be completely out of luck. Even further out, what if Microsoft went bankrupt (or bought by Apple, Google, RedHat, whoever) and their OS division is shelved?

Projects like ReactOS, Wine, DOSBox, etc. allow you to have another possible path in that uncertain future. Your program might not work out-of-the-box, but you have the source to tinker with and try to get it to work.

That is probably the same reason for running Wine on Windows, which is probably better than running an old program within a virtual machine.

Soon enough, you will probably run all of your programs in a browser anyway. But I digress :)

Moreover, Windows 7 just doesn't do some things any more that XP does. My other half has some old DOS era games she enjoys playing from time to time, but Windows 7 can't run them (without installing a whole VM and FreeDOS or something similarly dramatic). In XP, they just work. I do appreciate that Microsoft spend a lot of time and money maintaining backward compatibility for a very long time, but the fact is that they have chosen to break it in some cases in Windows 7, and that is a black-and-white loss if you happen to want to run the older stuff. Ditto for older hardware (where by older, in some cases I mean not very old at all but the vendor is an ass and never released Windows 7 drivers so you have to buy their new model instead).

http://www.dosbox.com/ ??

It'll come in handy to run those old DOS games that aren't properly clocked and run *way* too fast on modern machines....

Or you could just use DOSBox for that situation.

It all depends on what you really want to get into.

DOSBox - For all your old DOS based games, this emulator works wonders. The only part you need to worry about is getting them off those old 3.5" and 5.25" floppies. If the floppies don't work anymore or you just don't have a floppy drive, you can always hop over to the various Abandonware sites and try to get a full copy of the game from them. My favorite site is Home of the Underdogs.

Emulators - For your old console systems, you can easily pick up any number of emulators. There are plenty of places like The Emulator Zone that let you grab both an emulator and various game roms for any number of console systems. Most of them let you install a USB Gamepad of some sort that gives you an even more old game style feel. Many of them are pretty good these days and a lot of computers are more powerful than some of the even more recent consoles. I use a PS emulator to run all my old PS1 games and they look better than on my PS2.

Online - An absolutely amazing number of games and other things have been ported to an online version of the game. A quick Google search for "DOOM online" returns a Flash based Doom Conversion. My experience has shown that most of the online versions of games don't play as smooth as on emulators, but they are usually free and no installation is needed.

There are plenty of other solutions out there as well. You could probably track down an older computer on ebay if you looked hard enough and what does it hurt to let it sit in a closet or your attic when you want to pull it out. If you need to ask these questions, you haven't been looking hard enough. Many others have forged this road long before you came to it and they have freely provided their solutions to all.

If you are a gamer on a budget Gog.com has 300 classic DOS and Windows games ready to run under Windows 7, none of them costing more than $10

http://www.dosbox.com/
http://www.winehq.org/

FYI, Boxer is simply DosBox with a different frontend. Behind the pretty buttons, the entire emulation engine is DosBox 0.74: https://bitbucket.org/alunbestor/boxer/src/e21bfcb1d3a0/DOSBox/

You may have already known this and were simply suggesting Boxer as a good frontend for Mac (as per DosBox's own website, under FrontEnds: http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1

In this case I apologize. I've just had this argument before for Mac supporters stating that "Boxer is a superior emulator to DosBox". >

Pirates! Gold and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe are both fully supported and working with DOSBox.

Pirates! Gold and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe are both fully supported and working with DOSBox.

StarFlight actually works perfectly in CGA mode with DOSBox 0.74. There are still a handful of games that do not work, but that number seems to decrease with every release.

Just thinking about all those classic DOS apps that will never see the light of day otherwise

It might make you happy to know that you can already enjoy old classic DOS games on your machine by using DOSBox.

I had a similar problem. My twenty year old SNES cartridge just wouldn't work on my Wii no matter what I tried.

For your problem I would suggest:

http://www.dosbox.com/news.php?show_news=1

I personally use:

http://dfendreloaded.sourceforge.net/

I'm sure 10,000 other Slashdot geeks are falling all over themselves to reply, but you can play Keen in minutes for free simply by downloading DOSBox and then getting the game from one of the many DOS gaming download sites like this one. Just about everything that ran on DOS is either abandonware or public domain now. Welcome to emulated retro gaming!

Links386, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, Battlecruiser 3000, Day of the Tentacle, etc.

Master of Orion and Master of Magic work perfectly in Dosbox. Day of the Tentacle (and other Lucasarts adventures) work better-than-original (due to nice graphics filters) in ScummVM. Dunno about the other two.

I wonder if one could remake MoM as a mod for the latest Civilization... Civ4 was pretty flexible, and Civ5 is supposed to be even more so.

>>>Well, getting them to run on those PCs by tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys files

Should have bought an Atari, Commodore, or Amiga. These computers were plug-and-play simple and didn't make you dick around with that shit. You just inserted the game, typed LOAD, and played. Even today I still can't get the Wing Commander 1 and 2 to operate on a PC

Dosbox FTW. Yes, you sometimes have to dick around with it, but you can play tons of old games with it. Go to http://www.abandonia.com/ or similar sites, download a few of your old favourites (WC, Master of Magic, etc) and enjoy them with Dosbox. http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1

Update it yourself. TIE Fighter is a DOS game, and the GOG versions of DOS games all run in DOSBox. If you check the DOSBox Wiki, you can find instructions for running TIE Fighter on Windows 7. Just update the included config file.

You could write a custom program that would scrape the the data from a website you setup to allow that program to run stand alone or you figure out what the data format is and write a program to convert that.

If you want to recreate the data from scratch then you'd need to set up a website your group would access and enter data. That would be crowd sourcing but you'd probably want something specific to your needs but using easily maintainable code.

As others have stated you could use virtualization. Inside the virtual machine you may even be able to run a LAMP stack and run the DOS program with dosbox running as as an unprivileged user. http://www.dosbox.com/ http://www.virtualbox.org/ http://www.vmware.com/.

I would only consider the virtual solution a stop gap until you could get the database translated to something maintainable or recreate the data.

Heh, I remember using Computer Narcotics back in the 90's. At the very least there's a nice placebo effect. The guy who wrote CN was actually blind and had a BBS. Cool guy.

It's still on some shareware sites, but you need dosbox to run it on your modern win/mac/linux computer.

I found this list of more sound and light fun. Music and visuals are definitely a mental stimulant. But Oklahoma is off their rocker ;) They should ban whisky and cousins instead.

7. Play the game 15 years later on your modern gaming PC.

Hahaha, good one. Play the game 15 year later.

You do realize that 15 years ago puts us before the launch of Windows 95, right? (OK, not much before, but Windows 95 was released in August of 1995.) So you're talking DOS games. Remember, Windows 95 didn't launch with Direct X, but it had excellent DOS support, so PC games basically meant DOS games for quite a while after Windows 95.

Tried running a DOS game on your modern PC? Yeah, I'll bet it didn't work. Until you used DOSBox. Which is an emulator, just like what most people use to play console games that are 15 years old.

Which, incidentally, includes some PlayStation games. And PlayStation games are supported on all PS3s - via emulation, of course, but supported. So no need to run out and buy new copies.

You also left out a few steps of the typical PC game:

1. Insert disc, run installer. Wait for files to copy.
2. Run game, discover it comes with an auto-updater, and that there was a 500MB patch released three days before the game was released. Download and install that.
3. (Optional) After either the game's DRM decides you're a pirate or you get fed up with having to swap discs for a game that's taking up 20GB of disk space, hunt down the cracked version.

Of course, the great thing with the PS3 is that most PS3 games now have those first two steps. Inverted (patch runs prior to install), mind you, but they're there.

I agree. I've been replaying that series recently, since I came across http://www.dosbox.com/ which makes them playable again. It even fixes that crashing bug in the swamp of Quest for Glory IV.

Same for DOS port in DOSbox with a bunch of games.

I downloaded MOO 1 and 2 through GOG. I ran the installer via WINE, then copied the files and ran them with linux dosbox. GOG supports MOO 1 and 2 in windows via dosbox, so I only needed WINE to extract the archive, and then run as I see fit in Linux.

Any DOS game that GOG supports would probably run the same way. I'd check the DOSBOX compatibility table first: http://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?letter=a and if you want to check WINE compatibility with your GOG windows only game, you can check it here: http://appdb.winehq.org/

- not to mention the fact that an emulation of the hardware is going to be imperfect.

This may not be much of a problem in many cases. For example, a 90s DOS game such as Warcraft or Doom (to take two of their examples) has to be able to run on a wide array of different PCs; much of the time, you can get away by reproducing only the behaviour that hundreds of VGA cards or CPUs, for example, shared. That said, there is always the potential for trickery involving undocumented features. For example, DOSBox only recently gained support for the palette switching trick used by e.g. Lemmings.

The important part of a preservation project, in my opinion, is collecting and verifying information on the accuracy of different emulators. This can then be used to improve their accuracy.

>> there is not a single thing that REQUIRES paper in todays age.
> A paper aeroplane? Try that with your laptop you'll have to get a new one.

Actually, when I got it I did :) I ran the 1996 64k intro Paper which features LOTS of digital paper aeroplanes! I can confirm that due to Statix's excellent programming skills that my laptop is still working fine but thanks for your concern! :) Note: Paper works best now days under DOSBox or you can watch it online here.

Please stop using Windows 98. (I jest but would like to offer some alternatives.)

If games are the only thing holding you back, let me recommend GOG.com or if you're really old school Dos Box.

Actually if you really wanted to run Win3.x programs it is trivial to load DOSBox which will let you run pretty much anything from DOS through Win9X software easily, even on x64. How's THAT for backwards compatibility! That is one of the things I like about Good Old Games, for their older titles they come with a preconfigured DOSBox so it runs like a native app. Nice!

As far as TFA goes, I doubt really seriously MSFT can do much more than block the infected machines from running Windows update. for those saying "pop up a msgbox"? Most of these newer malware infections are hooked so deep you pretty much can't launch squat, including popping up a msgbox, without the program intercepting it and shutting it down. No CMD, no Run command, no Task Manager, nothing. It goes in and screws with all the permissions for anything other than itself so any attempt and bringing up another program results in "You do not have permission to perform this action. Please contact your system administrator".

So I doubt if it is anything like the malware that has been crossing my desk lately MSFT can do anything else. The Malicious Software Removal Tool gets its ass royally kicked by this new malware, especially the new "Fake security tool" crap like ST2010 and AV2010. Pretty much all the users can do is take it to a shop, as MSFT probably can't even pop a msgbox on one of those. they may be able to bring up a web page with a warning, but even that is doubtful as many of the new ones hijack all browser requests as well. Trust me they are really nasty bastards to deal with.

My introduction to classical music was hearing the Moonlight Sonata as integrated into Thexder through the speaker of a Tandy 1000 SL. Admittedly, the Tandy 1000's sound system was unusual and advanced for its time and produced effects and music very different from what we generally remember as PC speaker sound; however, the evolution of PC sound over the next few years followed a different path.

You can configure DOSBox to replicate that gorgeous old sound!

I was 15 when Doom was launched. In fact, I fondly remember the times all the classic FPSes (Quake 1/2, Duke 3D, Halflife, Heretic, Hexen) were released, and playing the demos bundled with magazine CDs. The first time I tried multiplayer was in college, around 1998. Friend of mine had 2 PCs at home, and we would play Halflife 1 and Quake 2/3 multiplayer. On weekends, 3 other guys would converge at his place for LAN parties. I ran into him recently, turns out he STILL plays Halflife 1, finding all the new games with activation etc too complicated.
We had another game together for old times' sake and it was just as much fun as before.
When it comes to single player, I use DosBOX to play . Currently I'm playing Fallout 1. There are still tons of perfectly playable and fun games from a generation ago, if you're not picky about graphics.

Imagine the kids playing today..with all the bullshit activation and servers going down, do you think they'll be able to revisit the games of today 10 or 20 years hence?

There are plenty of DOS games that I enjoyed playing, good luck getting them to run now.

Try DOSBox. It emulates DOS just fine for gaming.